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Friday, July 29, 2011

Sporting Lisbon vs Valencia CF - Match Preview

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, Valencia fans, this is going to be the telling match if Valencia CF is good enough to actually fight with Real Madrid and Barcelona or not. I know its still early in the season, but this is the time when Valencia CF must start showing character, determination and good play. I've watched Real Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga and Villarreal and I must say that all except Villarreal look really solid.

Real Madrid have started strong and continued strong through all their matches, Barcelona started slow, but have been improving tremendously through every match and Malaga started kinda slow, but have been in great form ever since. The only team I've watched and performing bad is Villarreal, but I won't count them out yet.

So this is the match where we can see if Valencia CF has made progress or regress in the last few days. I've seen the training session and they seems quite good overall and the players seem happy and confident, so I would expect a great showing tomorrow against Sporting Lisbon.

Sporting Lisbon is a Portuguese club based in the city of Lisbon, the club was founded in 1906 on the 1st of July and has been one of the top 3 clubs in Portugal ever since. Sporting Lisbon rivals are well known and they are Porto and Benfica who might be known a little bit more with their recent success. Whatever the case Sporting has won many national and international titles, including the Uefa Cup in 63/64 and more recently finishing runners up in 2004/05.

I've watched Sporting Lisbon play against Juventus just a few days ago and they absolutely destroyed Juventus. They won 2-1, but the score doesn't relay the great football they played and the struggles Juventus had, it was only Del Piero's magical shot in the last few minutes that gave Juventus a consolidation goal. Sporting don't play defensive football and we can expect them to go out and attack Valencia right from the start and really compete with us.

Sporting Lisbon is certainly going to be the toughest opponent we've had in preseason yet and apart from Roma the toughest overall, so I expect a great match first and foremost and a real overview of where Valencia CF stands.

Valencia CF on the other hand has had quite a bit of news come out with the transfer of Sergio Canales to Valencia CF on a loan deal from Real Madrid with the option to purchase the player, the news about Standard Liege central defender Mangala which is still up in the air with the blockade being the player himself asking for bigger salary and we have the reserve option of signing Pareja if the signing of Mangala fails.

What is more important though is that Tino Costa has been training normally with the rest of the squad, Ever Banega has also joined the squad and is training with the squad with the only worry right now being Bruno who has an injury.